Friday (2nd October) we had a day out for the first time this chilly year.

The Indian summer was about to break so it was the last day likely to be clear. The day dawned misty, clearing to a gloriously sunny day, cloudless blue, but with a chilly east wind, reached 16C.

Our plan was to take a long drive to the Swanage area on the south coast of England and if feasible visit a secluded bay. Afterwards I intended to take the opportunity to visit the small Swanage Met Office weather site to take close-up photographs, if time permitted.

Chapmans Pool, Jurassic coast (c)2015 E H Channon

Sitting on a rock in the warm sunshine, gentle sea, beautiful place, a perfect day.

Over the past month I have worked solid on rewriting the plot facilities

Figure 1, low resolution web image, comparable as shown at the beginning of May except a different geographic projection, done using wildly different software.

This is a quick look at what is new, the full thing is about to be used as part of a major article at the Talkshop.

Why? I was thoroughly fed up with fighting gnuplot, drives many people half crazy trying to get it to do what is wanted, all too often it simply can’t. In this case the final straw was no way of disabling automatic smearing of colour, nor can it draw literal filled polygons. (very amusingly given the authors say it can’t it then when writing out SVG format proceeds to write out filled polygons… can’t make it up stuff)

I was already using GLE, a tool with ancient origins. This will do what I say so all those polygons are drawn one at a time. The whole thing is very complicated, more so since my code writes GLE code and data before passing the whole lot over for plotting (GLE in turn calls ghostscript with postscript code, wheels within wheels)

A reader asked for a time representation… a tricky problem via a web site, the data is large…

Here are three different views, two from the UK Met Office and one from UAH, the newly released version. These run from January 1996 through December 2000.

Firstly here is an overview an Hovmoller plot for the same time span. These are widely used but rarely for earth whole views. Here are some I prepared earlier as a 2012 article (includes [2]) elsewhere which might help understanding on what I am doing for this article.

The 1998 El Niño event was similar to the less known ~1876 event, both seeming increasingly muted in the Met Office data. The El Niño form is a pulse of warmth primarily in tropical regions followed by a cool period. The warmth gradually disappearing apparently flowing poleward, producing a characteristic sideways V shape in Hovmoller graphics. The cool in inside the V. Perhaps preceeded by coolish. This pattern has repeated over the years.

Unfold

If instead of folding all longitudes into a mean as above a plain XY map for a month gives a different view, so we may be able to see from where on the globe there are contributions.

This new work showcases one month available for all datasets, February 2015. The image above, lower troposphere from UAH V6 beta is merely a picture, the true work is in a PDF for local display. The intent is information, not hitting you in the face, so whilst as such green is a colour few people like that is how it has turned out. New geographic map, new colours.

This is a large work where I am dismayed at having a choice forced by inaction of others between junking the work or showing known defective data which precludes much in the way of worthwhile further analysis.

Here is a 180 page document containing frequency plots for all 177 Met Office Datapoint site’s hourly data since July 2014. In addition geographic linkage is provided by location maps for each site and live links to public aerial images where known.